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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.